“IBM’s progress and momentum this year in the emerging, high-value segments of the IT industry are driven by our innovative technology, deep industry expertise and commitment to trust and security,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and chief executive officer. “Our leadership in the technology and services that deliver hybrid cloud, AI, blockchain, analytics and security has helped drive our overall performance, and is helping our clients unleash the full business value of these innovations.”

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Happy Tuesday. It’s still raining here in Austin, and about 80 miles west of us the Llano River has reached a 40-foot flood stage. Please stop the rain, at least for a little while. We’ve had enough.

If you need a ride away from the floods, or were simply wondering what’s been going on with Uber, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the company could be valued at 120 billion dollars in an IPO as early as 2019, which would nearly double its valuation from just two months ago.

As the Journal story points out, that “eye-popping” figure would make Uber worth more than General Motors, Ford Motor, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles combined.

While Uber is focused on making smarter car rides, Paperspace has scored $13 million in investment for its AI-fueled application development platform.

According to a report from TechCrunch, Paperspace wants to help developers build AI and machine learning apps with a software and hardware development platform powered by GPUs and other powerful chips.

Last spring, the company released gradient, a serverless tool to make it easier to deploy and manage Ai and machine learning workloads.

By making Gradient a serverless management tool, customers don’t have to think about the underlying infrastructure. Instead, Paperspace handles all of that for them providing the resources as needed. “We do a lot of GPU compute, but the big focus right now and really where the investors are buying into with this fundraise, is the idea that we are in a really unique position to build out a software layer and abstract a lot of that infrastructure away [for our customers].

In other news, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced yesterday it was creating a new college focused on better preparing students to adapt to the increasingly disruptive AI wave through a planned $1 billion investment, $350 million of which came from private equity guru Stephen Schwarzman.

Mr. Schwarzman said he hoped that the M.I.T. move might trigger others to invest in America’s A.I. future, not just commercially. He points to the major push the Chinese government is making, and notes the fruits of United States government-funded research in the past — technologies that helped America take the global lead in industries from the personal computer to the internet.

Just last month, IBM and MIT announced a 10-year, 240 million dollar investment to create the MIT-IBM Watson AI lab, which will carry out fundamental AI research and seek to propel scientific breakthroughs than unlock the potential of AI.